~ The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies

Volume 3.1, 2007

This article analyzes the affect of time and the rise of courtly culture on the representation of “sodomy” in three twelfth-century histories of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniæ (c. 1136), Wace’s Roman De Brut (c. 1155), and Lawman’s Brut (c. 1185-1216). The author’s analysis offers insights into how ideological representations of courtliness, masculinity, and sexuality in texts exert an influence on medieval men’s bodies.

This paper brings together two strands of criticism on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: the study of Chaucer’s use of the conventional medieval trope of the lover’s gaze and the arguments for the unified coherence of the poem that is anchored by the Christian ending. By comparing the trajectories of the lover’s gaze in Troilus and Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, the author argues that the critically contentious ending emerges as the very culmination of its meaning.